Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

A parable:

Once, many years ago, there came an anthropologist to study a distant mountain village. They were an oddly nervous, twitchy people. If a twig snapped, they would throw themselves to the ground. At night, they went through elaborate rituals of barricading their doors, even though, to the anthropologist's marvel, theft and interpersonal violence was virtually unheard of among them. The anthropologist did not speak the language very well, in particular because in these villagers' dialect temporal clauses were especially odd. But he could get out of them that the reason for these customs was that in the distant past, the village had been plagued with man-eating tigers.

The anthropologist, being a compassionate man, thought long and hard about how he could help these people, make them less timid, since it was clear their customs came with a lot of stress and anguish, as well as ostracism of those deemed to be sloppy in maintaining the old anti-tiger customs. But before he could...

You see where this is going, right?

He was eaten by a tiger.

The lesson I want to suggest by this parable: people aren't stupid. They don't adopt harmful behaviours without some sort of reason. A situation that made the behavior make sense.

If the situation persists for a long time, it may stick to culture, and maybe hang around for a while even after the situation has gone.

If the situation persists for a really long time, maybe the behaviour even sticks to biology.

But that doesn't matter. The first step must still be to consider the present situation. Make sure the tigers are not still around.

Female genital mutilation is common practice in some countries. Let's analyze and study the reasons for this practice that started centuries ago before we can say anything about it. I mean, hey, they burned people at crosses for a long time, they must have had a valid reason too, right? No, not every reason behind a custom is a valid one in the 21st century. If the parable villagers were nervous and twitchy because they feared demons would send the tiger, and they figured out that by sacrificing a baby would please the demons, nobody today should say that throwing a small child off a cliff is still an ethical custom. Of course, changing the custom is another thing, but we today have something called human values, ethical values, and human rights. They do trump a few ethical values that we have carried from the past. I'm not denying others' humanity because I say this, but when you come to a conclusion that an action is not as ethical as another, you should adopt it, and explain why you did it. There's no shame in stating that slavery is wrong, that genital mutilation is wrong, that child labor is wrong. Why is is wrong and racist for me to say that latin american machismo is wrong, especially and it results in so much suffering?

I'm as much against slavery and mutilation as you, but I think that in reaching for this easy explanation, conveniently placing ourselves at the pinnacle of civilisation and ethics, we risk overlooking some important things.

You name child labour as an evil thing. That's a great example of something that could potentially be made even worse if you just tell people to stop doing that evil thing without doing anything about the reason people do the evil thing.

It's true that behaviours can reinforce themselves. "Machismo" could easily be a thing where you are forced to play that game because so many others play that game, and that we could all be better off if we managed to coordinate a break with those practices. I said customs can be sticky.

When I said make sure the tigers are gone, I meant just that. Maybe the tigers ARE gone, and this is just our process of unsticking our bad customs. I just don't want us to take the easy way of assuming we are inherently better than earlier generations/other cultures.

Yeah but in this case it's not an outsider it's someone with firsthand experience of the cost of the mitigations, and the knowledge that the tiger isn't there.

I see your point, and understand the inclination to find a generalizable principal for understanding complex social situations. But there kind of just isn't one, each has its own nuances.

Is it, though? The article is what is commonly called "native advertising", paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At least they say so at the top.

And the article is also open that this "crusader against machismo" started his crusade when working for an NGO. It doesn't say which, but at the very least one agreeable to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I'd wager.

That foundation is not at all reluctant about pushing their peculiar cultural perspectives. In particular, they are infamous in certain circles for promoting the American custom of infant circumcision of boys, as a preventive measure against AIDS. The science in support for that is suspicious, to put it mildly (it's worse than mere cultural bias, too).

Does it really work, then, to teach male domestic abusers to change diapers? Was that sort of practical knowledge the thing they were lacking? I'm inclined to be suspicious - and also to be suspicious of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's arguments for it.

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